ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether the important various cultural, political and psychological features and variants of the instantiation of grief tell us what there is to tell about grief, or whether grief has something truly worth calling a logic. It argues that the logic of grief—at any rate, of any deep or serious grief—is undoubtedly not cotenable with 'objective thought'. Grief radically differs in its logic from sadness over a loss, or from sensation. Wittgenstein is saying in the quoted remark that the questions raise about grief, when we confusedly seek to assimilate it to sensations, are properly logical questions. Wittgenstein of course would cast this in a form that, superficially, differs somewhat from Merleau-Ponty. For Wittgenstein, logical observations, including about temporal phenomena, are themselves, roughly, non-temporal. The logic of grief is initially rather bewildering: it is a logic of process and of paradox.
